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Comment by johngossman | Hacker News Reader

There is a whole genre of these, starting with (as mentioned in the paper's introduction) "What is Life?" by Schrodinger. I've been idly working my way through a bunch of them, including Monod's "Chance and Necessity" (dated but excellent), Nick Lane's whole series of books (notably "The Vital Question"), Nurse's "What is Life?" (good if you want to learn about yeast), Zimmer's "Life's Edge" (haven't finished it yet, seems good). Honestly, the details change, and the emphasis of each author, but they are all speculative and hand-wavey. Pre-paradigmatic. My favorite quote is from "Life on the Edge" by McFadden and Al-Khalili:

"Biologists cannot even agree on a unique definition of life itself; but that hasn’t stopped them from unraveling aspects of the cell, the double helix, photosynthesis, enzymes and a host of other living phenomena"

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It’s been a while, but in this vein I enjoyed Chaitin’s Toward a Mathematical definition of “Life”: http://home.thep.lu.se/~henrik/mnxa09/Chaitin1979.pdf

Blew my mind as I started to wrap my brain around information theory.

The Lex Fridman interview with Lee Cronin "Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe" really opened my eyes. I find myself agreeing with the essential points Lee lays out, that there is a mathematical / physics-based definition for life or life-like systems such as advanced AI and robotics.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGiDqhSdLHk

Yeah but, how is an assembly index different than an LZW code?

I think they discussed that in the podcast.

I don't think they explained how it's different, I did listen to the podcast before posting my comment.

It's a pretty basic question that IMHO demands a clear and adequate explanation. If you read the 'abracadabra' example here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory

... you could be reading the abstract to an early paper explaining LZW codes.

I’ve always had the feeling that consciousness is part of the fabric of reality just like time and gravity.

It's a complex topic. I think it really got kicked off with "What is Life?" and we've been able to build more details on it since then. There are many parts of the story that we know in incredible details. Chaos theory, information theory, non-equillibrium thermodynamics, complexity and emergence, auto-catalytic chemistry are all just parts of it, and each one are massive fields of study on their own.

I'm not sure there will ever be a synthesis of all these things that creates a paradigm of some sort. There's simply too much.

I think the complexity researchers over the years have created a wide range of tooling for analysing complex systems across a large number of domains.

Consider complexity economics, computational social sciences, network sciences and cascading networks, evolutionary theories, parts of systems biology, connectomics and computational neuroscience etc.

The Santa Fe institute has been at the forefront and has an amazing collections of publications in their own press. David krakaeur's book "Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute" is like a 20 year survey paper and an amazing read.

I've been on this same journey through the Santa Fe institute pubs on this topic, which all started in a weird place because I wondered what kind of bizarre scientific research outfit had cormac McCarthy on staff as an artist in residence apart from the rest of the conspicuously multidisciplinary luminaries. What a unique, strange, and special intellectual atmosphere they must have had going in their prime and hopefully the best days are ahead still. It seems hard to compare to anything else.. one thinks of bell labs but probably only the peak of the Vienna circle comes close. We need more places with artists, philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists rubbing shoulders in the halls.

Santa Fe institute pubs? I’m curious to go there is it open to the public?

I believe they mean "publications".

https://www.santafe.edu/research/sfi-press

BTW these books were up on amazon India for like $10-$15 each (books with slight printing defects were being dumped in the 3rd world) so I lapped up the entire collection :P

Agree on “What is Life?” but recently learned that Leo Szilard is the first one to connect entropy and life, in a 1929 paper.

https://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/863.18/notes/computation/Szi...

Szilard seems to have been involved in everything.

>Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

Depends on whose expectations you are trying to meet.

To some it would be a major transition, to others it's just another everyday minor non-event in the very macro scheme of things.

If you're going to look at it mathematically it probably makes a difference when the number of non-extreme planetary environments begins to become significant compared to the number of possible chemical reactions among the limited number of elements in nature.

Only one of these numbers can reach truly astronomical proportions.

I'd add "Into the Cool" by Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan to that reading list.

I'm pretty sure that one was originally recommended here on HN, so I guess I'm feeding it back into the echo chamber. But well worth a read!

My hypothesis is that there is some objective definition of these phase changes such that the precise definitions of life etc doesn't matter.

My personal stab at an objective defintion: There is a sudden emergence of many more pathways for decay of the universe through entropy. The mechanisms that accelerate the creation of these new pathways is the set that includes "life".

Now with that base definition, we can talk about various forms of life - ones that involve DNA for example. But also others that do not.

That sounds like metaphysics. The Universe doesn't "want" to increase entropy, entropy increase is simply a consequence of applying basic statistics to matter and energy. There is no mechanism that actively explores various pathways for making entropy increase faster.

This is also an argument that didn't sit well with me when I heard Guillaume Verdon / Beff Jezos on his recent Lex podcast state that the universe wants to produce more entropy, and that life evolved the way it has because it's more efficient at producing heat and entropy than, say, a rock.

Perhaps he said that loosely as a figure of speech, because it should be obvious (religious beliefs aside) that the universe does not "want" anything. The remaining question is whether the emergence of life as an efficient entropy generator is coincidental to the laws of thermodynamics, or incentivized (in an evolutionary pressure sense) by them.

Of relevance, the tendency of matter to organize optimally into energy-absorbing and heat-dissipating structures is a whole theory of its own - see MIT Jeremy England's theory https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...

Yes, this "want" of pop science is annoying. I don't see anything lacking with simply using something like "enables", "allows". An environment with sticks allows evolutionary paths that can use sticks. A world with pools of high energy makes it easier for energy-using systems to develop there as opposed to outside of them. A world with light - go figure - makes it possible for light-using systems to subsist.

So are the atomic accretions known as humans who have 'wants' part of 'pop science'? Free will? If not, our justice system needs massive reconsideration, an idea with which many people concur but (I would have thought) is unlikely to prevail.

The justice system doesn't really depend on free will. If the threat of punishment deterministicly alters the behavior of society in a productive way, then this justifies it.

Maybe you’ve read this already (I still have it in my stack to read so can’t give any personal review) but ‘Determined’ by Robert Sapolsky sets the argument that we don’t have free will and that the justice system is flawed because of that.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2398369-why-free-will-d...

I read the article and I have to say, it's disturbingly compelling. Although I think that while we are unable to demonstrate intricate puppeting of real, conscious humans or something like that, there's some "truth" or "weight" in our thoughts and feelings that are genuine and outside of the typical sphere that free will governs (or, lacking that, fails to govern). Like, even if it could've been predicted with 73% accuracy at birth and 98% by age 25, the fact that someone deeply loves someone else doesn't seem like something to be written off as "this was in your genes and environment". It might still hold true in some sense if full-on mind control is invented, but then you wouldn't know if the feelings are real or fake, meaningful though they feel.

>Yes, this "want" of pop science is annoying. I don't see anything lacking with simply using something like "enables", "allows".

This misses the fact that the laws that guide the evolution of the universe are such that its evolution is "aimed towards" increasing entropy. This aim then entails what states are more likely over time, i.e. such states that increase the capacity for increasing entropy. It's not just an incidental fact that entropy increases, but that this trajectory is baked into the laws of nature. But the conceptual dual of an aim is a goal or a "want". So while not literally true, I think using intention terminology is more correct and insightful than leaving out any talk of goal-oriented behavior.

Who is Beff Jezos?

If you believe that you can want something, and that you are a subset of the universe, then the universe wants something (in the form of you).

Isn't this a category error? Just because my stomach lining is wet doesn't mean I'm wet.

A subset of you are wet, yes.

> There is no mechanism that actively explores various pathways for making entropy increase faster.

Dark matter?

It can be said to "want" these things. When referring to something without consciousness or free will, such as a magnet, we can colloquially say something like "the magnet wants to move towards a (larger) ferrous object". Of course, this attempt at movement through magnetic force is just a consequence of the magnetic attraction between the two objects and not some type of conscious thought, but criticizing the use of the word "want" here seems like needless pedantry to me. This is HN, not a peer-reviewed scientific paper.

Rosen's Life Itself is another, along with Maturana's work on autopoeisis.

"life is the process from birth until death"

"life is the way to make anything happen to you"

without a body (via life), a consciousness cant do anything

If you're merely running in a computer you could still communicate with someone else and do things that way.

that's called interfacing with a "body"

thanks for the downvotes, philosophy noobs

It is amazing this (perhaps pithy) comment is so down voted, yet you do make one very appropriate observation. Without a body a consciousness cannot do anything.

The obvious answer the so-called-science occult refuse to entertain is that consciousness is the universe inflecting itself and life is a subjective scope of potential capacitating this consciousness.

Life is the vessel and consciousness the universe peering back upon itself.

That is good philosophy.

Maybe not "science", yet neither is refusing to believe until someone else explains it to you.

Truth is not confined to the horizon of our ignorance, and science is merely our ignorance rigorously explained away.

What's a body? It doesn't have to be anything more than ones and zeros.

Ones and zeros aren't a body. A body is the composition of matter (silicon or carbon or whatever) which has capacity for potential. Potential is where the magic happens. Ones and zeros are states which may be represented by potential.

I would like to give you an example in that which is visible for your understanding.

in order for a tree to reproduce, it must sprout first, and have a life in which it produces a flower, which gets pollinated, generally speaking. The important point is that from that flower which is pollinated, eventually, a fruit is formed. When the fruit is formed and detaches, that detached fruit is the state of death. even if the tree dies, it can revive through what it stored within its fruit.

> It is amazing this (perhaps pithy) comment is so down voted

Socrates, Jesus, Lao-tzu, Bodhidharma, Buddha - all were outright killed or expelled and lived very lonely lives.

life is the state that a consciousness is combined with a body.

at death the consciousness separates from the body.

consciousness is composed of energy so it doesn't just disappear at death.

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